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Attica Locke is a force to be reckoned with and the first mystery in the Highway 59 series, Bluebird, Bluebird was outstanding, so I jumped when I saw this, the second in the series available to review. My thanks go to Net Galley and Mulholland Books for the review copy. It will be available to the public Tuesday, September 17, 2019.

Darren Mathewsis
a Black Texas Ranger, and his work is to unmask and prosecute members of the
sinister Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. When the story opens we see that our
protagonist is still drinking; he and his wife Lisa, who were estranged during
the last book, have reached a détente of sorts. He will still drink, but it
will be civilized consumption in front of his wife. A glass of beer. There.
See, was that so bad? He has it handled. In exchange, he agrees to bring his
work off the road, and so he is assigned to a supervisory position directing
other officers in pursuit of the ABT. He doesn’t want to drive a desk, but it’s
a concession he makes for her.

But Darren has gotten himself into an awkward spot, a
compromising one. His mother—a woman that did not raise him but with whom he
has recently developed a relationship of sorts—says it’s a shame that nobody
has found the .38 used to kill Ronnie Malvo. Mack, who is dear to Darren, is a
suspect in that homicide, and his mother has the gun. He tells himself that his
frequent contact with her is a sign that they have a closer relationship and
that the money and gifts he brings her are a pleasure for him to provide. But
it’s not true; actually, his mother is blackmailing him.

And before you know it, he’s drinking hard, anywhere and
everywhere that Lisa can’t see it.

Everyone that reads a lot of fiction in general or mysteries
in particular develops a mental list of things they are tired of seeing. I for
one could die happy if I never saw another alcoholic protagonist; I am also
weary of seeing mean mothers. Why does every author have to take a pot shot at
motherhood? But for every item on my list, there’s an exceptional writer that
gets a pass because their prose is so solid, their voice so clear and resonant,
their pacing so flawless, their characters so credible. Locke is one of those
writers. (And to be fair, there are other features on my no-no list that Locke
avoids nicely.)

So there’s the iffy marriage; there’s the bottle; there’s
the blackmailing mama. But that’s not the half of it. Darren is sent into the
field, despite his protests and his promise to Lisa, because there’s a missing
child–the child of a member of the ABT– who has last been seen in a
historically Black community, and the Rangers need a Black lawman to ease the
way of the investigation. The Rangers don’t have a lot of Black officers to
call out.

So next thing we know Darren is out in the boondocks,
serving as a companion officer to a Caucasian sheriff that doesn’t really want
much to do with Darren. In fact, the local power brokers, all of them white, are
visibly uncomfortable in his presence, particularly when he enters private
homes. And he knows that information is being withheld from him, not only by
these people but also by Leroy Page, an elderly African-American man that was
the last one to see Levi alive.

Locke is noteworthy for the way she creates a sense of
disorientation, a murk that starts with the setting—swampy, dark, wet—and extends
into the characters that withhold information and make remarks that are both
overly general but also sometimes loaded with double meaning that he can’t
decode. And into all of this mess comes his best friend Greg, a Caucasian FBI man that has been sent in to
explore the possibility of a hate crime here.

Part of Locke’s magic is her perceptive nature and the way
she segues political events into the storyline. And so the pages fairly vibrate
with betrayal when Greg, who knows from Darren that Leroy has not been
forthcoming and won’t permit a warrantless search of his home, says that Leroy
is guilty of a hate crime. The current administration takes a low view of such
matters, Greg points out, and after all, Leroy referred to him as the “HCIC;
Head Cracker In Charge.” Darren takes exception:

“Cracker and nigger are not the same, and you know it,” Darren said.

“If we don’t prosecute hate crimes against whites—if that’s what this is,” Greg said, just to get Darren to hear him out, “if we don’t prosecute crimes against white lives to the degree that we do those against black lives—“

Darren laughed so hard the bourbon nearly choked him.

“They need to see the FBI taking every hate crime seriously.”

“So this is the Jackie Robinson of federal hate crime cases?”

It’s preposterous, of course. For one thing, as Darren
points out, there’s no body. The child may be alive. But he is shaken by his
friend’s behavior, and when Lisa drives out to visit on her day off, Darren is
further concerned by how intimately she and Greg regard one another. It’s one
more thing he doesn’t need, and at this point he has nobody left, apart from
his very elderly uncle, who tells him the truth and isn’t hiding anything. He does his best to help Leroy, but Leroy
doesn’t trust him and is also not telling him everything, and he’s forced to
recognize that this elderly man that reminds him of his uncles and Mack is,
after all, another stranger.

Meanwhile, Darren makes a decision that knocks up against
the ethics that his upbringing and his profession demand.

The tension builds and there’s no putting this book down. I
stayed up late because I couldn’t sleep until I knew the outcome, which I did
not see coming.

Locke is brilliant and seems to me like a shoo-in for a
Grand Masters Award. This book and the one before it are highly recommended.

Sarah Valentine was raised to believe that she was white, and that her dark complexion was the product of her Greek ancestors. But whereas she does have Greek ancestry in her DNA, Sarah is also of African descent. This strange but compelling, searingly honest memoir came to me courtesy of Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press; it will be available to the public tomorrow, August 6, 2019.

Valentine is an excellent writer, and she spins us back in
time to her childhood, spent in a private school, a Catholic upper middle class
family, celebrating European cultural events. She is the only African-American
or mixed race student at her school, and every now and then, someone there will
make a remark that infers she is Black. This puzzles her. Her own mother makes
remarks bordering on White Supremacy, assumptions about the habits and
character of Black people; of course, none of this should apply to Sarah, in
her view, because she insists that Sarah is Greek and Irish, and Irish, and
Irish.

Reading of her experiences, I am initially surprised that
such culturally clueless, entirely white parents would be permitted to adopt a
Black child; but here’s the thing. She isn’t adopted. She is her mother’s
biological child, and to talk about who her biological father is, is to
recognize that her mother was not always faithful to her father. It’s a keg of
dynamite, one that her parents carefully navigate around. Not only have they
not spoken about this to Sarah; they have not spoken about it to each other. It
is a fiction that holds their marriage together; toss a tablecloth over that
keg of TNT there and for goodness sake, don’t bump it.

I came away feeling sorry for her father.

There’s a lot more going on between Sarah and her parents,
particularly her mother, a talented but not entirely stable parent who assigns
impossible standards to her daughter. Meanwhile, as Sarah grows up and leaves
for college, the fiction of her heritage is uncovered, first as a mere suspicion,
then later as fact.

This isn’t an easy read or a fun one. It can’t be. Sarah’s
pain bleeds through the pages as we see the toxic ingredients and outcomes in
her story; her mother’s mental health and her own, as well as eating disorders
and the implosion of her parents’ marriage. The particulars of her lifelong
struggle make it impossible to draw a larger lesson in terms of civil rights
issues; there are some salient points that will speak to women that grew up in
the mid-20th century as Sarah’s mother did, and as I did. And here
we find one small spark of optimism, the fact that when women are raped,
whether at college or elsewhere, we stand a greater chance of being believed
than we did in the past. Still, it’s a grim tale overall, and I don’t think
there’s any other way Sarah could honestly have told it.

Attica Locke’s mysteries are consistently excellent, so when
I found a review copy for this first entry in her Highway 59 series, I felt as
if I had struck gold. Big thanks go to Net Galley and Mulholland books. This
book is for sale now.

Darren Matthews is a Black Texas Ranger, and he’s in big
trouble. He’s suspended from the force, and his wife Lisa has thrown him out of
the house until he cleans up his act. She doesn’t want to be married to a man
that is so careless of his own health and safety; if he takes a desk job and
quits drinking, he can come home to his family. But right now he’s on his own,
and right now he’s still drinking, and it is in the process of moving from one
drink to another that he meets Randie, the recent widow of Michael Wright. The
official story the local sheriff tells is that Michael killed Missy Dale, a
Caucasian woman whose body was dragged from the swamp behind Geneva’s bar, and
then himself. The only problem with that theory, Darren discovers, is that
Michael died before Missy. Darren thinks they were both murdered.

As Darren goes deeper into the case, after receiving
short-term, conditional support from his boss, he finds more elements that
suggest a murder and subsequent cover-up. He’s closer to the truth; the sheriff
and another local big-shot are closer to apoplexy; and he’s less likely to go
home to Lisa.

Attica Locke is one of a handful of consistency brilliant
mystery writers in the US. Her capacity to carry me to the murky rural South
and create taut suspension that makes me lean forward physically as I follow
the story is matchless. I’ve read more than a hundred other books between her
earlier work and this one, yet I still remember the characters, the setting,
and above all, that brooding, simmering dark highway. This is what sets her
apart from other authors in an otherwise crowded field.

I also like the way she addresses racism, and here Darren
investigates the role of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas; I ache as I read of
the continuous injustice that Darren, Michael, and so many others face both
within this story and in real life. And I want to cheer when Darren says that
he will never leave, because the ABT and other White Supremacy groups don’t get
to decide what Texas is. It is as much his story as it is theirs, and he will fight
for it.

“Darren had always wanted to
believe that theirs was the last generation to have to live that way, that
change might trickle down from the White House. When, in fact, the opposite had
proven true. In the wake of Obama, America had told on itself.”

Darren risks his life once
again in his determination to dig up the rotten hidden truth and lay it out in
the sun where everyone can see it. The ruling scions of Lark are equally
determined to prevent him from doing it. The intensity of this thing is off the
charts, but fortunately I know this author’s work well enough not to start
reading it close to bedtime, because once I am into the book’s second half, I
will have to finish it before I can do anything else, including sleep.

The good news for me and for other Locke fans is that this is the beginning of a series. I received this galley after publication, and now the second of the Highway 59 series, Heaven, My Home, is slated for release in September. (Watch this blog!)

I am always on the lookout for something different, and so I
leapt at the chance to read this publication free and early. Thanks go to Net
Galley and Henry Holt. It’s for sale now.

The story is set in and around Chicago, back when the city
was first born. It tells a tale of shifting alliances and double crosses; yet
in other ways it is an old story, one in which a Caucasian interloper cannot
bear to see a Black man rise to a position of wealth and influence. It’s not an
easy read.

Conceptually the story is strong, but the author tries to do
too much at once. Shifting points of view; development of disparate characters;
and an old time dialect that is challenging all by itself serve to render the
story muddy and confusing. Too much is lost, and at the halfway point, I gave
it up and commenced skimming.

Despite this, I believe Carr is a talented writer and I like
his ideas. I would read his work again.

The Spanish-American War sparked the earliest fire of U.S.
imperialism, and the eccentric rich man that pushed it forward, Theodore Roosevelt,
was at its center. Risen provides a contemporary view of this badly managed
chapter in American history, dispelling longstanding myths and examining the
long term effect of the conflict on the U.S. military. My thanks go to Net
Galley and Scribner for the review copy, which I read free in exchange for this
honest review. This book is for sale now.

Roosevelt was challenged with a number of health problems as
a youngster, but instead of embracing his sedentary, privileged existence, he
embarked on a series of physically demanding adventures in order to strengthen
his constitution and affirm his masculinity.

When Cuban nationalists sought independence from Spain,
Teddy began campaigning for American intervention. Men of his generation was
had not known the destruction of lives and property that touched every part of
this nation during the American Civil War, and like most young people, they
were unwilling to listen to their elders. Roosevelt believed that war was a
splendid thing, and that in facing death, men were elevated to a higher level.
He joined his voice to those in the press advocating military aid to Cuba, and
after tapping every powerful connection his wealthy family could access, he was
successful.

His own unit—all volunteers—were
dubbed the “Rough Riders.” Most had no military training of any kind; the
mighty Union Army had been all but disbanded once the nation was reunited.
Though they were promoted as cowboys, the rugged individuals of the Wild West,
a goodly number hailed from Wall Street and Harvard. In addition to being able
to fund their own wartime excursion, they were noteworthy in their riding
capability.

There was no San Juan Hill. There was a series of them.

The American invasion of Cuba cast a spotlight on its
unpreparedness. Transporting troops, beasts and equipment across the Atlantic
was a debacle of the worst order. There weren’t even close to enough seaworthy
vessels, and because of this, most of the so-called cowboys fought on foot the
entire time; horses and mules were stuck back in Tampa waiting to sail. There
wasn’t enough food, potable water, or appropriate clothing for most of the men;
the wealthiest among them fared best, but there were many occasions when there
wasn’t any food to be bought at any price. There had been no reconnaissance and
so they went in blind; the heat and disease killed more Americans than the
Spaniards did. Vultures and immense land crabs that measured 2 feet across and
traveled by the thousands made short work of the dead when not buried
immediately. American losses were nearly triple those of the Spanish, and when
the war ended there were no hospitals or sanitation ready to receive the
legions of sick and wounded when they returned from the Caribbean.

Roosevelt used the occasion to point to the need for a
standing army and U.S. readiness, and ultimately this was his one useful
contribution. In other regards, the man was an ass hat. His bald-faced racism,
though not unusual at the time, went over badly with the Cuban freedom fighters
that were supposed to benefit from their presence. He crowed to his friends
about how much he enjoyed shooting an enemy soldier from just a few feet away “like
a jackrabbit,” and called his 45 days of combat the ultimate hunting trip. Mark
Twain hated the guy, and it’s not hard to see why.

Risen has an engaging writing style, and he uses lots of
well-chosen quotations. His research is excellent as are his sources. I would
have liked to see more of a breakdown along the lines of social class and other
demographics, but this war did not yield a rich archival treasury like the one
that came from the Civil War, so this may not be possible.

All told, this history is a find. Right now it seems that
every second historian on the planet is writing about World War II, whereas
this cringeworthy but significant chapter of American history has been largely
left by the wayside. I highly recommend
this book.

3.5 rounded up; thanks go to Net Galley and Simon and
Schuster for the review copy.

Dave is seventy, and his dog Lucy is up there in years as
well. Unlike most of Barry’s essays and books, this one has a reflective aspect
and a bit of advice for those nearing or entering their senior years. There’s
still a great deal of humor, but there’s a gently philosophical self-help
thrust not present in his earlier work. As a 60-year-old retired reader that
loves her dog, I represent his target demographic. And I also have to say—his
demographic is clearly Caucasian, and this made me a mite uncomfortable. I’ll
get back to that in a minute. I have to, since apparently no other reviewer
anywhere is going to address it. *

Dave breaks his advice down into seven suggestions, all of
which are in some way inspired by Lucy. None of his points are especially new
or profound, but because he is so capable in describing and explaining them, he
makes old tired advice seem worthy of my attention. A number of his
observations left me nodding my head, and he includes liberal humorous anecdotes
that in some cases, made me laugh out loud. And here I will put on my teacher
hat and tell you that brain studies reveal that learning is easier when there
is positive emotion that goes with it.

Dave wants senior citizens to stop merely being
content—which is exactly what I am—and take the occasional trip out of our
comfort zones. He describes a family trip to a wildlife preserve in Africa to
illustrate his point, and his story is so hysterical that it leaves me gasping
for air. I can never imagine myself participating, as Dave has, in a parade
involving decorated lawnmowers, but I love reading about it. And he reminds
senior men to find their friends and tell them how important they are. A great
many men have friends that are very important, and that they haven’t talked to
in person or even by phone for years. What are you waiting for? At some point,
one of you will be dead, and then the survivor will realize his mistake. Barry
argues for seizing the moment. (He also makes me glad I am female. My friends
hear from me all the damn time, and when I leave the planet, they will know
what they meant to me.)

I began reading Barry’s work in the 1980s, and during the
‘90s and ‘00s, I used one of his columns, “How to Play with a Dog,” to teach
middle school students expository writing. Step by step, he told us how to do
it, and in the most enjoyable way; and that’s what expository writing is. Kids
that didn’t like to write sat up and listened to this. It is a genius piece of
work, and because of this, and because of the long period during which I loved
each and every thing he wrote, this book receives a favorable rating from me.
Because there’s also a big problem with it. Keep reading.

I loved the way Barry skewers the whole ‘mindfulness’ shtick even as he also advocates for some of its better aspects. When he digs into the topic of the diversity workshop, I feel a little hitch in my breathing, a twinge of anxiety. I read Dave Barry Does Japan, and the things he said about the Japanese demonstrated that his understanding of other races and cultures needs an upgrade. Here he tells us that his wife is half Cuban, half Jewish, so we know he’s probably not an alt-right white supremacist, but at the same time, some of the jokes he makes are cringe-worthy at best. When he tells us that if he was ever forced to sit through another diversity workshop (as was required by the Miami Herald,) he would join the Klan and the Black staff members would go with him, I slumped. Aw, shit. Dave, statements like this are why diversity training even exists. If there’s a training and you are invited, run there and get you a real good seat. In fact, there’s a chance that other staffers had to go to a workshop that was mostly aimed at you!

I have had a similar experience with 3 or 4 other books I’ve
reviewed, and there’s always someone out there that will leave a comment saying
it’s ridiculous to fuss over one little sentence in the book. In anticipation,
I have an analogy just for those people, and here it is:

imagine you have been invited to a potluck supper. You hand your contribution, maybe a bowl of potato salad to the host to add to the collection of food, and you grab a plate. There are three long tables, and you move down the row selecting from among the crispy fried chicken, the smoky ribs, watermelon, three-alarm chili, coleslaw, nachos, garden salad, pasta salad, fruit salad, a bowl of human excrement, baked squash with cinnamon, homemade cherry pie, key lime pie, shrimp salad, pesto salad, deviled eggs, and of course, your own contribution, the potato salad. But once you sit down, your appetite has fled, hasn’t it? You came in feeling hungry. You skipped a meal before this thing, cause you knew there’d be a lot of good things to eat. And of course, when you passed that bowl of human poo, you didn’t take any of it, and like everyone else, you politely diverted your eyes away from it once you were satisfied that it was exactly what it looked like. What the hell…? After a glance around the room to see whether a joke is about to be sprung, or at least a conversation had about this inappropriate addition, you edge toward the garbage, where you quietly deposit your uneaten meal, and then you edge toward the door…all because of that one thing.

Why would you toss a plateful of delicious food merely
because there was one distasteful thing on the table? Because neither you nor
your food could be close to that mess for even a minute.

So that’s how I see the Klan reference. It’s hard to chuckle
after a bomb like that has been included, and he even includes a snarky remark
after it about the fact that some will be offended, which comes off like an
extended middle finger to anyone that doesn’t like a Klan-friendly joke.

And maybe that’s how it rolls with him; he has all the money
he needs, and he doesn’t care if there are people that don’t like what he
wrote. But I cannot for the life of me understand why someone would write a
memoir like this, one intended to provide an excellent philosophy for his aging
readers, one which will also be a part of his legacy after he’s gone, and then
include something that will hurt some of the people that read it. I just don’t
get it.

Do I recommend this book to you? From where I sit, if you
want it, don’t pay full price for it. I wouldn’t buy it for anyone I like, but
now you have my take on it, so the as always, the decision rests with you.

I was invited to read this debut novel by Net Galley and
Simon and Schuster, but when I first saw it in my inbox, I recoiled. Another
addiction memoir! Another chance to live through someone else’s excruciating
nightmare! But then I read a few early reviews—they didn’t bear the numbed courtesy
of an obligatory write-up. And then my
own sense of courtesy tipped me over the edge. I was, after all, invited. Did I
not want to be invited anymore? Of course I should read it.

The story is Lichtman’s own written as autofiction, and his
unusual writing style drew me in. I was surprised to see how quickly I went
through it. At the outset, he is teaching creative writing and is crestfallen
to find that a student he has championed has plagiarized her work for him, and not
only is his anecdote written with great humor, it is immediately familiar to me,
and most likely will be to all English teachers. We want to believe; we want to be supportive.
And once in awhile, someone younger than ourselves comes along and manipulates
the hell out of us. It is a humbling experience.

Jonas is half American, half Swede, and he finds that to get off of opiates and opiods, he needs to be in Sweden, where street drugs are much harder to procure. He is enrolled in a graduate program in Malmo, but finds his time is primarily consumed by the refugee crisis as he volunteers to teach in a language school. Young men from the Middle East come by the thousands, and he is proud that Sweden doesn’t close its border, doesn’t set a cap to the number of immigrants it will welcome. At the same time, the Swedish government has some double standards where race is concerned; the Roma people that set up an encampment are quickly swept away. Then the nightclub bombing in Paris provides officials with an excuse to shut it all down; it’s a tremendous blow to the refugees and to those that want to help them.

At times I fear for this writer, because he seems to have no
filters with which to protect his own heart as he hurls himself into his
volunteer work; he wants to make a difference so desperately. Many years ago I saw a short film that showed
a Bambi-like deer grazing in a forest, and then the massive foot of Godzilla
smashes it like a bug, and in his ragged, hungry quest for social justice, the
author reminds me of that deer. Social justice work requires sacrifice to be
sure, but a little care toward one’s own mental health is also essential.
Lichtman’s master’s thesis focuses on a Swedish writer that ultimately succumbs
to despair, turning on the car and closing the garage door, and I found myself
urging this author to have a care, lest the same happen to him, a danger he refers
to himself in the narrative. (From the acknowledgements at the end, I see that he
appears to have emerged in one piece, at least so far.)

The stories of the refugee boys are searing ones. A young
man told of walking through Iran, followed by Turkey, Greece, Macedonia,
Serbia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and Denmark on his way to Sweden. The whole
journey was done on foot. So many families were dead that the boys’ tutors
learned it was sometimes better not to inquire too deeply about those left
behind. At one point, Jonas decides to become a mentor to one person, but
things go amiss and he ruefully recalls his own role as that of “clumsy
Samaritan.”

Lichtman’s prose is gently philosophical in a style that is
slightly reminiscent of Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance, though in no way derivative. His perceptive
commentary regarding the events that unfold around him, along with the lessons
he learns about himself, is witty and absorbing. Along the way I picked up a
little knowledge about Swedish culture and society that I didn’t have before.

The title has sharp edges.

Recommended to those interested in Swedish culture, the
refugee crisis, and addiction issues, as well as to anyone that just enjoys a
good memoir.

This compact but potent collection of poetry is so good that it hurts. DeMaris B. Hill spills America’s historical shame across the printed page with the articulate rage and power of the generations she writes about. My thanks go to Bloomsbury and Net Galley for the review copy. This collection becomes available to the public January 15. 2019.

The keys to reading Hill’s poetry are in the introduction, and in additional brief introductions at the beginning of each poem. These are broken down into five sections that depict the different ways in which women of color have been bound over the centuries, and Hill points out that Black resistance didn’t start with Black Lives Matter, and it didn’t start with Dr. King and Rosa Parks either. American Black folk have been fighting for their rights for centuries, but some periods have been better publicized and more widely recognized than others.

The introduction is not long by most standards, but I found myself impatient to read poetry, so halfway through it I skipped to the poetry; read the collection; and then I went back to reread the introduction from the beginning. After that I went back over the poems a second time, lingering over my favorites. The review copy was a rough one, and it’s hard to read poetry if the spacing is whack. Your copy is almost guaranteed to be cleaner, but you may choose to read these more than once anyway. Strong poetry will do that to you.

Each poem is devoted to an African-American woman that has fought in one way or another, and the conclusion is written for Hill’s son. The book is billed as a collection that takes us from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland, which it does, and both of these poems are resonant and in the case of Bland, achingly sorrowful. My own favorites were those written about Eartha Kitt, who was familiar to me, and Ruby McCollum, who wasn’t. The poem about Alice Clifton made me wish I could unread it, because it is harsh and horrible, but in case it wasn’t clear from the get go: Hill isn’t writing to spare our tender feelings. She’s pissed, and she’s right to be.

These poems contain some of the finest figurative language I have read anywhere.

Highly recommended for those that seek social justice and that love excellent poetry.

You may not have had the grades or the money to attend Columbia University, but you can read Professor Delbanco’s book anyway. It’s meaty and interesting, and it clears up some longstanding myths about slavery in the USA. My thanks go to Net Galley and Penguin Random House for the review copy; this book is for sale now.

At the outset I find this work a little on the slow side, and I wonder if I am in for five hundred pages of drone. Not to worry. By the five percent mark the whole thing wakes up. Slavery from the time of the early European immigrants to the American Civil War is mapped out, and I found myself wishing I had read it before I taught social studies instead of during retirement. Sacred cows are slain and there’s plenty of information that is new to me. For example, I did not know that the number of runaway slaves was always a fairly small, economically of little consequence but powerful in its example. I didn’t know that Caucasian people were retaliated against sometimes by sending them into slavery; since one couldn’t tell a person with a tiny amount of African-American heritage from a white person, it was possible to lie about someone whose roots were entirely European and send them down south. And although I understood that the great Frederick Douglass was hugely influential, I hadn’t understood the power of the slave narrative as a genre:

“When [slave narratives] were first published, they were weapons in a war just begun. Today they belong to a vast literature devoted to every aspect of the slave system–proof, in one sense, of how far we have come, but evidence, too, of the impassable gulf between the antebellum readers whom they shocked by revealing a hidden world .and current readers, for whom they are archival records of a world long gone. Consigned to college reading lists, the slave narratives, which were once urgent calls to action, now furnish occasions for competitive grieving in the safety of retrospect.”

It is painful to envision a roomful of young people flipping through their phones or napping during a lecture or discussion about this damning aspect of U.S. history that haunts us even today; and yet I know it happens, because I have seen it among the teenagers I have taught. I want to roar, “Where’s your sense of outrage?” And yet it’s there; but many that are activists against cop violence and other modern civil rights issues haven’t yet made the connection between the present and our national origins. So I feel this guy’s pain.

For the interested reader of history, the narrative flows well and the documentation is thorough and beyond reproach. Delbanco has a sharp, perceptive sense of humor and this keeps the reader further engaged.

I recommend this book as an essential addition to the home or classroom library of every history teacher and reader.